Excuse me, I really must gibber at the oriel window

This Land Is Mine (1943) is out on DVD. This is one of the movies I had to watch on YouTube because I couldn't find it on home video for annoyance or money, excellent as I thought it was. It stars Charles Laughton, but mostly I talked about George Sanders. In Laughton's honor, therefore, and in honor of movies where I talk about someone else, I am finally going to write about a movie I promised asakiyume so long ago it's actually embarrassing. I've had notes on my desktop for years.

Tiny Wittgenstein aside, there are reasons it's taken me forever to write about The Canterville Ghost (1944). It's not a classic film. Jules Dassin was handed the direction five weeks into production; the story takes its name from Oscar Wilde and shares about as much material as an Anglo-American culture clash and a ghost named Sir Simon de Canterville who wants nothing more than to sleep, as he has not for three hundred years, in the garden beyond the pine woods. It's tonally confused even for a wartime fantasy-comedy with dramatic underpinnings, its production values range unevenly from A-list effects to some guys with motorcycles and German helmets, and while the finale is thematically a good idea, in practice it came out kind of silly. I am nonetheless strangely fond of it, possibly because it's the movie that introduced me to Robert Young. I caught it on TCM in 2007 and taped a re-run a couple of years later, which does me so much good now that I have neither a television nor a VCR.

The plot, or at least the set-up: Since 1643, Sir Simon de Canterville (Charles Laughton) has been the most fearsome ghost in the history of English hauntings, notwithstanding that in life he was a rather sweet, marshmallowy type who funked a duel and for his shame was walled up by his father behind an arras with the curse that he should walk the halls of his ancestral castle until a kinsman of his, wearing the self-same signet ring he dishonored, should perform a brave deed in his name. Unfortunately, whether through the effects of the curse or the power of suggestion, all the likeliest Cantervilles since Sir Simon's time have displayed the tough moral fiber of Sir Robin the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot: the ancestor who dropped down a well to get out of Waterloo, the ancestor who laid low in drag throughout the Thirty Years' War, the ancestor who charged the opposite way from the Light Brigade . . . In the present day, all that remains of the family are a couple of legal guardians and the six-year-old Lady Jessica (Margaret O'Brien), an imaginative, very serious child who has grown up so frightened of the ghost—she's never seen it herself, but it's been credited over the years with an impressive string of derangements and suicides—that a tinsmith hailing her from the roof sends her running inside with a scream. Nonetheless, when there are visitors to the castle she steels herself and makes a perfect, if pint-sized hostess to the company of U.S. Army Rangers being billeted on the grounds, among them one Cuffy Williams (Robert Young), a cheerfully smart-mouthed private who doesn't believe in ghosts. He changes his tune sharpish, as his new allies might say, when a Laughton-shaped spectre comes out of the wall that night, rattling chains, throttling itself, bleeding on things, and generally carrying on like Anne Boleyn by Weston and Lee—but like the class clown that he is, Cuffy deals with this genuinely spooky intrusion by catcalling it, and in short order it's the Rangers who are terrifying the ghost as they don sheets and gas masks (looking creepily like some panels of Sandman) and chase it back up the chimney. And as a punchy, triumphant Cuffy doubles over with laughter at the notion that the ghost might have come looking for a kinsman in a pack of American GIs, we see on the back of his neck the birthmark that attends all males of the Canterville line . . .

You really can figure out where it goes from here, although I will warn you that if you skip the movie entirely, you'll miss out on one of the great jitterbugging scenes of cinema. (Seriously. It's right up there with Nils Poppe.) A lot of the rhythms are awkward, as if they started shooting the movie without knowing quite how much of it there was supposed to be; I don't mean it has continuity problems, but the prologue is completely superfluous and the denouement doesn't need to take all the time it does and the other major action sequence suffers from too little budget and too many motorcycles. But Margaret O'Brien is an amazingly non-cloying child actor for the period, and I'll go on about Robert Young after the cut, and it is really their relationship that allows me to believe the final piece of the plot, which would otherwise be simply sentimental and unlikely. ( I don't care what the others did. This is Cuffy, see? )

If you want the definitive film about World War II, British-American relations, and the haunting ways the present is affected by the past, watch A Canterbury Tale (1944). But if this one ever crosses your television screen, it's fun. It has an actor I turned out to like very much in it. It will not help you at all with Jules Dassin's later work. Charles Laughton gets to deliver lines like the title of this post with flawless Shakespearean diction. What more reason do you need?